WEDQ (channel 3.4) is a secondary PBS member

television station A television station is a set of equipment managed by a business, organisation or other entity, such as an amateur television (ATV) operator, that transmits video content and audio content via radio waves directly from a transmitter on the ea ...

licensed to

Tampa, Florida Tampa () is a city on the Gulf Coast of the U.S. state of Florida. The city's borders include the north shore of Tampa Bay and the east shore of Old Tampa Bay. Tampa is the largest city in the Tampa Bay area and the seat of Hillsborough ...

, United States, serving the

Tampa Bay area The Tampa Bay area is a major populated area surrounding Tampa Bay on the west coast of Florida in the United States. It includes the main cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater. It is the 18th largest metropolitan area in the Unite ...

. Owned by Florida West Coast Public Broadcasting, it is a

sister station In broadcasting, sister stations or sister channels are radio or television stations operated by the same company, either by direct ownership or through a management agreement. Radio sister stations will often have different formats, and somet ...

to primary PBS member

WEDU WEDU (channel 3) is a PBS member television station licensed to Tampa, Florida, United States, serving the Tampa Bay area. Owned by Florida West Coast Public Broadcasting, it is a sister station to fellow PBS member WEDQ (channel 3.4). The two ...

(channel 3). The two stations share studios on North Boulevard in Tampa, and transmitter facilities in

Riverview, Florida Riverview is an unincorporated census-designated place in Hillsborough County, Florida, United States. It is located south of Brandon. The population was 107,396 in the 2020 census, up from 71,050 in the 2010 census. Many of Tampa Bay's radio ...

History

The station first signed on the air on September 12, 1966, as WUSF-TV, owned by the

University of South Florida The University of South Florida (USF) is a public research university with its main campus located in Tampa, Florida, and other campuses in St. Petersburg and Sarasota. It is one of 12 members of the State University System of Florida. USF i ...

. Its main rival was WEDU, which has long been one of the highest-rated

public television Public broadcasting involves radio, television and other electronic media outlets whose primary mission is public service. Public broadcasters receive funding from diverse sources including license fees, individual contributions, public financing ...

stations in the country. However, due to its ties with the university, most of WUSF's programming was educational in nature—including

distance learning Distance education, also known as distance learning, is the education of students who may not always be physically present at a school, or where the learner and the teacher are separated in both time and distance. Traditionally, this usually in ...

, which WUSF aired during the afternoon and late-night hours. WUSF was also known for showing a wide variety of home improvement programming, such as '' Hometime,'' during the late 1980s and 1990s that WEDU did not regularly program. On October 12, 2015, the University of South Florida voted to explore placing WUSF-TV into the FCC's spectrum auction in 2016, a move that could lead to the station sharing a channel with another area station, moving its signal to a VHF channel, or ceasing operations altogether. On February 8, 2017, USF announced that the WUSF-TV license had been sold for $18.8 million in the auction, and that the station would cease operations;WUSF TV License Sold; Station Will End Operations
/ref> on August 11, it announced that the station would go off the air on October 15. On October 8, it was announced that WUSF-TV had entered into a channel sharing agreement with WEDU, enabling the station to continue operations. WUSF-TV's broadcast license would also be transferred to WEDU's owner, Florida West Coast Public Broadcasting; the transfer was completed on January 24, 2018. USF retained its radio stations, WUSF-FM and WSMR. On October 15, 2017, at 11:59 p.m., after playing an abbreviated version of "

The Star-Spangled Banner "The Star-Spangled Banner" is the national anthem of the United States. The lyrics come from the "Defence of Fort M'Henry", a poem written on September 14, 1814, by 35-year-old lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key after witnessing the ...

," WUSF-TV officially signed off-air and became WEDQ. WEDQ then began airing the secondary schedule of PBS programming that had been on WEDU's fourth subchannel (previously branded as "WEDU Plus"), combined with some of WUSF-TV's more popular shows.

Technical information

Subchannels

The station's digital signal is

multiplexed In telecommunications and computer networking, multiplexing (sometimes contracted to muxing) is a method by which multiple analog or digital signals are combined into one signal over a shared medium. The aim is to share a scarce resource - a ...

: After WEDU took control of WUSF-TV and changed its calls to WEDQ, it merged all of WEDU and WEDQ's over-the-air channels as subchannels of WEDU. As a result, WEDQ changed its virtual channel to 3.4, taking the place of the WEDU+ service that had previously aired on WEDU's fourth subchannel. WEDU also began airing WUSF-TV's two former subchannels,

PBS Kids PBS Kids is the brand for most of the children's programming aired by the Public Broadcasting Service ( PBS) in the United States. Some public television children's programs are not produced by PBS member stations or transmitted by PBS. Inste ...

and Create, on channels 3.5 and 3.6, respectively.

Analog-to-digital conversion

WUSF-TV shut down its analog signal, over

UHF Ultra high frequency (UHF) is the ITU designation for radio frequencies in the range between 300 megahertz (MHz) and 3 gigahertz (GHz), also known as the decimetre band as the wavelengths range from one meter to one tenth of a meter (on ...

channel 16, on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television.List of Digital Full-Power Stations
/ref> The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition digital UHF channel 34,http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/feb/09/wfla-will-wait-until-june-shut-down-analog-tv-sign/ using PSIP to display WUSF-TV's

virtual channel In most telecommunications organizations, a virtual channel is a method of remapping the ''program number'' as used in H.222 Program Association Tables and Program Mapping Tables to a channel number that can be entered via digits on a receiver's ...

as 16 on digital television receivers.

References

{{PBS PBS member stations Television channels and stations established in 1966 EDQ 1966 establishments in Florida